In Kenya, I always dream that I’m in Lebanon, in the house that I’ve left. I wake up many times in the night and I fall back to sleep every time to the sounds of Indian Ocean. The waves almost reach my always-damp garden, then recede in a never-ending play of ebb and flow.
Sometimes I leave my bedroom and go into the garden when the moon is full and I don’t need anything to light my path. The light of the moon shines on the ever so slowly receding water and I quickly fall asleep. I fall asleep on the sand or on the straw chair at the bottom of the garden near the walls made of the trunks of coconut trees.
I’ve always lived my dreams there as though they were a part of my life. They accompany me in the daylight hours and I don’t forget them. I wake up in the morning and think about what I was dreaming the night before. When I tell Eva, my Austrian neighbor and only friend in Mombasa, about what seemed to be my only dream, she tells me not to be scared. She tells me that the skies of Kenya are vast and that dreams, however many you have, evaporate in the sky.
Perhaps I should call my dreams nightmares. I remember the explosion that murdered my brother Baha’ in Beirut. From that time on God stopped visiting me in my dreams. Perhaps that was the moment when my dreams became nightmares. We wanted to go down to the shelter that day, but my mother Nadia insisted on staying on the second floor. She usually didn’t insist on anything, but that day she did. She usually lived the fairly submissive life that Nahil wanted—because my grandmother controlled her life just as she controlled the house and our lives—detached from her own desires. Nadia lived submissively. And then when she finally asserted an opinion, she was immediately silenced! She went silent both out of shock and as a protest. Her silence angers me just as the submissiveness she showed to my father Salama’s family angered me in the past. She didn’t want to go down into the shelter and insisted that we all stay together on the first floor. It was as if, on that one day, she wanted to avenge her life. But instead she lost my brother Baha’.
On the night before my trip from Mombasa to Beirut, Chris comes to me filled with desire and kisses my face and neck. He runs his hand over the breasts he loves and with his other arm tries to pull my body close to him, repeating, Oh Myriam, love me, love me please.
I feel utterly weak, almost paralyzed, when we are in bed and Chris starts talking. To overcome this paralysis, I resort to a fantasy that gives me pleasure. Over time, I’ve grown used to this thing that happens between us: him approaching me and letting his hand discover my body anew. I’m also used to putting my fantasies to work as soon as he starts kissing me, stripping off my clothes and repeating words under his breath that increase his desire. I let myself be free and move my body to the rhythm of Asmahan’s voice coming from the corner of the room. I begin a game of the body, separate from the memory of true love. In the absence of the man I love, I think that I will surely adapt to the situation that I myself consented to when I left Beirut. I let myself share pleasure with a man whom I don’t love even though he is filled with desire and tries to please me.
When he starts flirting with me I always fantasize that he is Georges, or Joe, the man I met in an Italian restaurant in South Africa. I carried on a brief affair with Joe; it only lasted a year, during which I visited Cape Town seven times to meet him in some random hotel room. My Austrian friend Eva used to leave deliberately when the phone would ring for me in the hotel room, telling me before she shut the door behind her that we didn’t have much time—she just has to go back to the market once more. She’d hug me, leaving her arms around my body for a long time as though she feared losing me, mumbling words from which I understand that she can’t say anything. Then she’d walk backward, looking at me the whole time and leave. Eva only hugged me like this when she knew that I had a rendezvous with Joe. A hug with an equal mix of love and reproach that’s hard to explain: it’s like the hug of a mother who’s just discovered that her daughter has given her virginity to the neighbor’s son. Lying on the bed, I watched Eva close the door of the hotel room on me. I don’t know why at that moment an idea powerfully overtook me—that betrayal is a defense against the absence of love. Joe also came to Mombasa to meet me at the Gardens Hotel. After a year, I decided to stop seeing him. When he asked me why, I didn’t know what to answer. I searched for just one word to tell him and I couldn’t find it. I’ve grown tired. I’m tired of traveling. I’m tired of the repetition, of the heaviness of a sick, disabled relationship that can’t develop.
“The animal in you is tired of you…” Eva says when I end my relationship with Joe, poetic as usual, sometimes she’s even musical. I consider how Eva could become a famous poet, though she prefers to be an environmental activist working with endangered animals and sick trees and forests.
Sometimes I leave my fantasies and remember specific moments in my life, like when I first discovered my body with Olga. We’d leave Asmahan’s voice playing and Olga would start kissing me on my mouth and breasts. I try hard to recall the moments of happiness that we lived together—Olga and I—without feeling I was doing something wrong. But that one night with Chris I can’t get my fantasies working. It’s as though I’m afflicted by a loss of memory or my fantasies can no longer help me tune into Georges or Joe’s features. The faces of everyone with whom I’ve shared pleasure suddenly vanish, as if they’ve all passed through my life quickly, in one stroke of forgetfulness. As if they never were. I try to recall their features but their faces are nebulous and unclear, their eyes all distorted and staring at me standing right in front of them. An invisible force is pushing them back. I try to recall Olga’s face and I see it vividly, as if it were right there in front of me. I turn my gaze away, toward my suitcase, and start recounting the previous night’s dream to Chris. I dream I’m a tree, a very tall tree, swaying in the breeze. I tell him that in the dream I’m a tree. He’s far away from me and can’t touch me. And I’m feeling a strange kind of pleasure, as though the wind itself were making love to me. I know that I reach orgasm but I don’t know how. It’s enough to hear the tree’s leaves rustle in the gentle breeze to feel an excitement that no man can arouse in me.
It’s not Asmahan’s voice alone that transports me to this memory that I love and that helps me bear my life in Kenya. There are also the novels that Olga sends me and the vivid colors of the sky reflected in sea surrounding my house—bright colors, more vivid than the sky’s colors in Beirut and more brilliant.
My dreams change and I forget most of them, except those that repeat themselves and invade me, year after year. There are many trees and plants and mountains in them that I’m always able to fly above easily. When I try to fall sleep I recall those dreams. As if I choose my dreams to push away the nightmare that’s lived with me for so many years. My dream of friendly trees is perhaps some kind of recompense. After my brother Baha’’s death, I so often see burning trees with the disfigured faces of featureless people hovering above them. I begin to fear trees. I no longer dream that I’m walking above them, as if walking on the ground. I no longer dream that I’m flying above them, never landing. Trees themselves become pure terror.
Sometimes I wake up afraid, then my headache worsens and I don’t know if it’s the pain or my nightmares that have awoken me. I leave the bedroom on my tiptoes, open the door that faces the Indian Ocean in Mombasa and go out into the garden. I sit on the white sand that reflects the moonlight with incandescent, silvery colors. Silver stretches out over the surface of the sand and together they enter the depths of the water in the distance. The water mingles with the nighttime light from a distance like an incomplete rainbow. The sounds of the waves recur in a rhythm like sex between two lovers who never get bored. I am quickly overcome and fall asleep on the sand, only to wake up with water flowing around me on all sides. Nothing eases my severe headaches except the play of the sea, its ebb and flow, its humidity and saltiness. The sea is absorbed by the sand and submerges me like an act of total love. The most beautiful thing I experienced living in Mombasa was my discovery
of the sea’s playful ebb and flow. This calms my anxiety as though taming it. Ebb and flow, like the play between dreams and nightmares, my life here and my life there, the silence of my mother and the madness of my father. Ebb and flow… past and present. Whenever I think I have forgotten the past, it forces itself on me again in all my dreams.
There’s no distance at all between ebb and flow in my psychoanalyst Seetajeet’s clinic in Mombasa. They mix and mingle completely and I can no longer distinguish between them. This is not what exhausts me, though. What exhausts me is speaking in a language that is not my own about things that pain me, that make me cry. I must to talk to a British doctor of Indian origin in a language that is not my own. In these moments I feel like someone digging an enormous hole with only one soft, weak hand. I want him to understand and to help me understand myself, what’s happening to me. I want him to help me be delivered from sins I have not committed: the sin of my brother’s death, the sin of my mother’s silence, the sin of my father’s madness… the sin of being forced to abort my baby, the baby that I’m not yet able to conceive with Chris, as though I am being punished. But for three years I haven’t been sure if my psychoanalyst understands me. Sometimes he comments on what I’ve said at moments when I really want him to stay silent. I don’t know how to speak another language and cry at the same time. But I don’t stop seeing him, either. I start speaking English with an Indian accent to be sure that what I’m saying is clear and understandable. Sometimes I find myself speaking Arabic inadvertently. When I notice, I suddenly fall silent, as if I’ve lost my voice. There is a painful quality to this silence. It takes some time to get back to my second or third language. Languages collide in my head and prevent words from escaping from my mouth. The Arabic language no longer emerges clearly; it’s weepy and convulsive. I raise my head from the pillow on the couch and look at him suddenly, only to find his eyes closed, as though he’s been taken by a passing distraction. Or perhaps he didn’t notice what was happening, didn’t notice my words in Arabic, words he can’t understand.
Look at me, I say to him choking on my tears, Look at me! You are not with me…!
He doesn’t respond. He opens his eyes, looking straight ahead, far away from me, and not meeting my gaze.
“I got rid of my baby like a little bug. Now I want to get pregnant and I can’t…!” I whisper in a voice emerging from deep inside me, trying to stand up at the end of the session and forgetting that the person in front of me doesn’t understand the language of my skin.
I collapse on the chair and drown in a torrent of tears.
Before the plane takes off, Chris and I have a coffee together for the last time in the small building that is the Nairobi airport. The coffee is thick and I feel nauseated. The airport looks like debris from the surrounding buildings, or just broken, nothing in it working. Even the few airport employees sitting around appear to be just visiting a place where they don’t understand how things work. All it takes is a glance at the windows, where flimsy nylon bags have replaced broken glass, to remember that this vast country has lived through continuous but interrupted wars, not so different than our wars. In different countries little wars have a tragic resemblance, I think, not paying attention to Chris’s repeated questions. “When are you coming back home?”
“When are you coming back home?” he reiterates and then, when he’s lost hope of me responding, “Are you coming back home?” I don’t speak since I can’t find a way to answer these two questions at the same time. I think about what he says, “coming back home.” I think that we— Chris and I—simply don’t see eye to eye on anything, not even on the meaning of words. For me, “coming back home” is exactly what I’m doing right now. I reflect that perhaps I’m overcome by a desire to live life, while this man spends his time dissecting that same desire. Like any serious, systematic scientist he remains at a measured distance from life in order to dissect it.
I remember the first time I arrived in Kenya from Australia. I found Chris waiting for me at the airport in Nairobi. I was scared. It was the first time I’d been in a place where I could see only black-skinned people. All of them Africans. I asked myself at that moment why I was scared. Was my fear derived from a collective memory I carry inside me, a memory of my ancestors’ theft of these people’s wealth—their mines and their natural resources? Was I scared of having to settle the accounts of those who came before me, whatever their nationality… those people who came, exploited them, got rich and never paid a price for anything?
Those first faces I saw remain in my mind. I’ve never forgotten even one of the people I saw at that moment of my arrival in the airport. I’ve remembered them for years. Whenever I travel, I search for them. Sometimes I spot one of them and find that he’s gotten a bit older, his eyes grown hard. I recall these people when Chris is on top of me. I close my eyes and think about them. I imagine Samuel, the man who works in the garden of my house. I picture his face and his shining black skin, while Chris, after reaching orgasm, tells me about the types of malaria that people here suffer from and the differences in malaria between one African country and another.
But why am I thinking about Chris right now? Why am I remembering the habits of his that I never really related to? Is it because I am a woman without habits? Is this why the years that I spent with him in Kenya still remain somehow outside my life—as though I didn’t live them? Or is it the years themselves that are outside my life? Or is it because I am outside of any place that connects me to life? Or perhaps it all goes back to Chris being particularly systematic, his life intimately linked to the ticking of the clock. He sees his life as a system of unchanging habits, while I … drink coffee in the morning… No, no … actually I drink tea. I smoke… no, I don’t! But yes I do, I smoke sometimes. I go for a walk every morning… no, not most mornings. I always prefer to be alone at home… alone with my novels that Olga took pains to send me all those years.
Perhaps my sole habit is tied to memory: a permanent feeling of being in a transient state since I left Lebanon. In my house in Mombasa I leave my handbag on the table in the entryway, as though I’m about to leave at any minute or only there on a short trip, visiting strangers. “Myriam, this is your house. This is your house and you are its mistress, why don’t you put your things away? Why do you leave stuff scattered around like this, in suitcases?” Chris always repeats these questions impatiently, in his English accent, when he sees my things left for days in the small hallway next to the front door of the house. He looks at my address book and the leather bag where I keep the novels that I receive from Lebanon. I take them with me in the car or leave them in the front garden of the house where I often sit. But Chris’s words don’t diminish my feelings of alienation from him—if anything they make it worse. I’m well aware that my habit of always being on alert and nervously ready for anything is something I brought with me from wartime Beirut, from the memory of bomb shelters and needing to move from one place to another, safer one. This remains inside of me, never leaving me, throughout years of nomadic moving and wandering between Adelaide and Mombasa. I know that my anxiety has become like my shadow and long ago left its imprint on my personality.
Only Samuel the Kenyan gardener offers me some sense of security. He gives me peace of mind when he tells me that moving doesn’t have to mean anything, that it’s possible for a person to remain at home in his heart wherever he may be. He tells me that he feels able to live multiple lives while in the very same place. When he’s somewhere else, he can feel that there’s another person inside him.
Samuel approaches the chair where I’m sitting in the garden and starts flipping through the books that fill the bag lying open on the grass near my feet. Some of the books are in Arabic, so look like a puzzle to him. He leaves the books, looks at me and says that every book has a life here and a life there, where it came from. He continues, “This is how I live both inside and outside.” I don’t understand exactly what he means, but right away I connect what he’s saying
to something he once told me about his old grandfather, who left the bush half-naked and came to Mombasa to live, have a family and settle down, dressing like the foreigners who lived in the city. That time he told me that he feels I understand everything, as though I too have started to carry his memories—though I’m a stranger to this land, I live this life here and share these experiences. I have started spending more time with Samuel than with Chris, who is entranced by his little insects, painstakingly fixed on glass slides under his microscope. He says that if they multiplied enough and filled the world, they could finish off humankind.
Other Lives Page 3
